This was an extremely fun project to work on. My goal was to come up with a scene that I would like to create using some industry methods that save on performance and time, such as:
Creating my own procedural textures, using particle effects to scatter foliage, using the displacement modifier for surface irregularities, instancing objects within the scene to speed up geometry alterations, etc.
The scene was entirely modelled in Blender and rendered in Cycles.
The surfacing for the frog was done in Substance Painter, and the rest of the environment was surfaced procedurally using node graphs in Blender.
Closeup Renders:
Breakdown:
The hat was made by first creating a very high poly mesh made up of braids, and then projected as a normal map onto a simpler low poly hat mesh.
The foliage was instanced from a separate scene into the main scene. This helped keep the main scene from being too heavy, and made it very easy to make global changes to geometry after I finished set dressing the pond.